Thorn

Thorn is small and unusually white. From about 975 an abbey stood at its centre, from the twelfth century a house of noblewomen ruling a tiny principality, and the village grew around it; the white came under the French after 1794, when a tax on windows led the poor to brick windows up and limewash the houses to hide the scars, a practice that stuck and is still maintained. The result is a village of white walls, cobbled lanes and dark shutters that photographs strongly in low sun and looks flat under grey cloud. The abbey church keeps its crypt and a set of memorials from the abbey centuries. There is little other business here beyond looking and eating: the village takes an hour to walk, and the surroundings are Maas country, flat, green and cut through with water.

History

About 975 Bishop Ansfried of Utrecht founded a Benedictine nunnery here on drained swampland near the Roman road from Maastricht to Nijmegen. From the 12th century it became a secular foundation of at most twenty noble ladies under an abbess, who governed a tiny principality of the Holy Roman Empire until its abolition in 1797 (Wikipedia, Thorn, Netherlands).

The main sights

• The abbey church - the surviving church of the canonesses, with its crypt and monuments.
• The white streets - limewashed housefronts and cobbles through the whole village core.
• The Kapel onder de Linden - the small decorated chapel among the lime trees at the edge of the village.
• The Maas countryside - fields, dykes and water meadows immediately outside the houses.

When to go

Late spring to early autumn, ideally in the first or last hours of daylight when the white walls take colour. Summer weekends bring coach parties into lanes that are too narrow for them. Winter is bleak and much is shut. It works best as a stop on a longer drive along the Maas rather than as a destination.

Things to know

It is one street pattern and one church, exhausted in an hour, and the coach trade supports terraces and souvenir shops out of proportion to the size of the place. Parking is at the edge and charged. Photographs make it look emptier than it is. In flat light the whitewash reads as grey and the appeal drops away sharply.

Nearby

Roermond and the Maasplassen lakes are about twenty minutes away.

Key facts